The Netherlands’ Royal Academy of Fine Arts has existed since 1682, but there’s quite a contrast between the temple they built in the early nineteenth century and its Bauhaus replacement from the twentieth. read more

In this commonwealth of knowledge, it is necessary to share out our sources of insight and wisdom. Here are just a few sites (“blogs”, even) that readers of this little corner of the web ought to take notes of. read more

Muscovy

India

Academica

Chartres is filed in my mind as the cathedral of my childhood. I must’ve been around 4 or 5 when I first walked amidst this medieval vision of stone and stained glass — some years before I ever visited the cathedral of New York where I was born. read more

Pretoria exudes a detached respectability enlivened by the ceremony of its century-long status as the executive capital of a unified South Africa. And sitting at the heart of the city of jacarandas is Kerkplein — Church Square. read more

Scotland’s oldest university already boasts the world’s finest collection of medieval maces, but the Archbishop of St Andrews recently presented it with a new mace on behalf of the Catholic church to mark the university’s 600th anniversary. read more

For the past fourteen years a St Petersburg boy — Vladimir Putin — has been the man at the helm of the ship of state in Russia, and while Moscow is still the top dog St Petersburg is increasingly stealing the limelight. read more

The other day I started drawing up a list. It started out as a list of people you should know, but then it took on its own life in the realms of my imagination as an assemblage of notables whether of thought, word, or deed. read more

Legislatures often have symbols employed for their own particular use — the red portcullis for the House of Lords, a green one for the Commons, the flax plant for Stormont — and the Scottish Parliament is no different. read more

As you make the four-hour drive from Keetmanshoop to Lüderitz, before you reach the coastal town you can turn off to visit the eery colonial ghost town of Kolmanskop: Kolmannskuppe in the original German. read more

It is truly a sad thing for a summer to end, and yet it is an inevitable part of the endless cycle of life. There were the usual rites of July, then some parties in August, and a number of outbreaks of jollity in Oxford. read more

The Church in Scandinavia is on a slow but steady ascendant, and it’s telling that there are now more seminarians studying for the priesthood for the Nordic countries than there are for all of Ireland. read more